As Dusk Falls Review: A tense and intimate psychological thriller

In the dust of Arizona, at sunset, the destinies of many lives are consumed, first alien and then indissolubly connected. More than fate, what binds them are the choices, those of the protagonists and, consequently, of the players. The town of Two Rock is the stage where blood, betrayals, murders and traumas are the main actors of the videogame drama staged by INTERIOR / NIGHT which, on the basis of a high-tension thriller, erects a deeply intimate interactive play, a path plurivalent that takes on different forms depending on the way we decide to live it. As Dusk Falls it can turn into a path of perdition, into a jumble of lies and double-dealing, or into a cathartic journey of redemption in the name of sincerity and forgiveness.

To direct the work is Caroline Marchal, CEO and Creative director of INTERIOR / NIGHT, who collaborated with David Cage for Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls (here is our review of Heavy Rain): the similarities with the Quantic Dream productions are they exhaust mainly in the genre they belong to, in the desire to plumb the abyss of the human soul and in the essential use of QTEs. In terms of interactivity, As Dusk Falls in some respects it has more points of contact with a visual novel, and moreover, to distance itself from other exponents of the category, it chooses to propose an intelligently distinctive narrative style. How “author’s signature“in fact, he adopts a rather peculiar visual approach, which can leave one puzzled at first, yet certainly not indifferent.

One story, many lives

As Dusk Falls is told through different faces, different eyes and changing moods, and it does so by moving through the years, in a story with a marked chorus. It develops back and forth in time, along a perennial ups and downs of emotions that branch out in six chapters of a specific hour each, following a rhythm comparable to that of modern seriality, where each episode ends with a cliffhanger aimed at keeping the attention and curiosity hungry.

As Dusk Falls tells us about Vince and his family, traveling (or on the run?) in 1998 along Road 66; introduces us to Jay, the kindest of the Holt brothers, criminals a little by choice, a little by coercion; tells us about Zoe, Vince’s 6-year-old girl, who was forced to witness a siege of the Desert Dream motel where she is staying with her father and where the Holt took refuge following a somewhat rickety robbery. The hall of a hotel like many others becomes the scene of a tense standoff between hostages, robbers and local police forces, with consequences that will have repercussions in subsequent years.

The detective thriller is just the pretext to stage a family drama with multiple emotional facets, a not at all approximate digging into the shadow sides of the actors on screen: As Dusk Falls confronts us with dysfunctional relationships, shows us the effects of the post-traumatic stress syndrome, immerses us in a story of youthful rebellion, desire for liberation, paranoia and secrets. She shuns banality but doesn’t deepen every nuance, she keeps herself constantly engaging but doesn’t always take the right time to give each cast member the deserved space. From time to time, the game requires us to take the point of view of a single character, with branches that have echoes capable of influencing the behavior of the protagonists that we will impersonate later: the interlocking mechanism is oiled to the point of inducing us to empathize with conviction in all the players in the field, even in those who, in the grand scheme of INERIOR / NIGHT, are of a little more marginal importance.

In the midst of well-defined psychologies and character traits, sin insinuates some timid uncertainty in closing some key events, with revelations inserted more for sensationalism than for concrete narrative needs, the expression of a screenplay that, especially in the second half, becomes more and more stratified. He does not lose either the compass or the ultimate goal of the journey, capable of proving to be as impactful as the first few hours predicted, but occasionally slows down and accelerates with discontinuity.

The strength of the story is then marked by a pertinent musical accompaniment and a good dubbing in Italian which, despite some qualitative failure and sporadic audio mixing problems, manages to give the right emphasis to the most emotionally disturbing scenes. After all, As Dusk Falls does not sweeten anything, nor does it turn a blind eye to situations of physical and verbal violence. His graphic novel style does not contribute to the lightening of the tones, and although in the more dynamic scenes the visual approach chosen by INTERIOR / NIGHT may not be quite the most suitable – since it often breaks the action in a sobbing trend – on the whole, the aesthetic personality of the production is worth more than the success of the individual parts.

Interaction and choices

There is no great interactivity in As Dusk Falls: unlike more modern graphic adventures, like those of Supermassive Games or Quantic Dream (have you read our review of The Quarry?), We will never take direct control of a character, nor we will move it within a three-dimensional environment in search of clues or points of interest.

All screens are mostly static, and the user will have to direct the pointer to select the icons to interact with. Similarly, while the narrative follows its own path, the player will have to establish the success or (rare) failure of an action by completing a series of elementary Quick Time Eventswhose complexity and duration are fully adjustable in the settings menu, in order to ensure accessibility as complete as possible.

Choose in companyAs Dusk Falls is also playable in company, up to a maximum of eight players both locally and online. To deal with any shortage of pads, you can download the appropriate Companion App on iOS and Android devices, connect your profile and use your smartphone or tablet as a control device. In this case, the choices to be made in the course of the adventure are subject to a majority system, which we have already described to you in our As Dusk Falls multiplayer test.

Clearly the choices are the main focus of As Dusk Falls: from the smallest to the most remarkable, each decision influences the facts in a concrete way, not changing so much the continuation of the story as the way of reacting of the characters and their destinies. At the end of each chapter, a map similar to the one admired in Detroit Become Human (recovered here our review of Detroit) will show us the paths taken and those still to be discovered, allowing us to replay the adventure starting from certain checkpoints, without the need to start all over from the beginning. We will have both the ability to overwrite the save, and to walk new paths on the story diagram without recording progress: in this way the whole experience of As Dusk Falls is intelligently elastic in its use. The wide decision-making freedom, which is spread on a nuanced gray scale without any choice being actually more correct than another, however, brings to light the weaknesses of a screenplay with a quality that is not always completely homogeneous: there are paths that lead with less credible narrative implications, with scenes that require a discreet suspension of disbelief, and moreover some branches take advantage of too many forcing to carry on the story.

Other paths, character attitudes and cause-effect relationships appear much more cohesive: this is a slight inhomogeneity caused by a good interpretative malleability, cross and delight of productions where the player has a fair margin of control in a story that, necessarily of things, however, follows a specific direction.